Cache Hunting - Discovering A Hoard of Silver Hammered Coins (Story 14)
The Varieties of "Wire Money" Coins Compiled in a Hoard - Brief Numismatic History
The hoard consisted of 2,700 silver hammered coins which are often referred to as "Wire Money" (and "Fish Scales" - Cheshuiki - "чешуйки" in Russian, for their shape and thinness) because of the unusual method of their manufacture. The silver for coinage was coming from the West-European kingdoms.
The minting process used to begin with melting of the silver received by the mint for special hot cleaning (all the Early-Russian silver coins of the 16th - beginning of the 17th centuries, until 1626, had the "960" milessimal fineness).
Then the silver bars were processed into wire of the needed diameter. The wire was cut into measured lengths which were flattened and annealed to gain their plasticity. The resulting blanks were struck between two dies. During the hammering the dies were not conjugated: the lower die was fixed in a special support, the upper die was held in the hand of the striker (hammerer), who directed it on the blank laying on the lower die.
Such crude hammering resulted in coins of a slightly elongated shape, often showing traces of the original wire from which they had been made. From the beginning of the 15th century, the dies were not engraved by hand, but imprinted to the red-hot iron with super strong counter-dies with engraved image or inscription. Invention and use of the counter-dies allowed to produce a series of identical dies.
Denga was the first face-value of wire money and had a weight of about a gram. In 1350, production of Dengas ("moskovkas") as hammered coins began only in the southern Russian principalities, with the state of Novgorod and the City of Pskov producing their own slightly larger coins ("novgorodkas"). In their earliest form, Dengas were imitations of the silver coinage of the Golden Horde's Khans, usually bearing blundered or meaningless legends.
From the time of the Prince Dmitry Donskoy (1362-1389) onwards, the coins began to take a more Russian form, with depictions of people and animals, and legends inscribed in the Old-Russian script, although the presence of legends partly in Arabic (the language of the Horde) persisted on some coins until the time of the Czar Ivan III Vasiljevich (1462-1505). From 1462 onwards, the wire money coins had only the image of a horseman on the obverse. On the reverse, the wire hammereds bore the legend - Czar's name and his titles, which was often partly cut off.
Under the rule of Ivan The Terrible in 1535, a monetary reform took place, with the northern "novgorodka" being valued at twice the southern Denga or "moskovka". The production of novgorodkas depicting a horseman with a spear began. Novgorodka was henceforth known as Kopek, Kopeck, Copeck, or Kopeyka (in Russian: Копейка), its name derived from the Russian word "kop'yo" ("Копье") — a spear. At their widest, Kopecks were only about 15 millimeters. From the 1540s onwards, the horseman bears a crown which represented Ivan the Terrible, who was Grand Prince of all Russia until 1547, and Czar thereafter.
The image of St. George on horse slaying the dragon with spare - a logo on modern Russian coins, is still carrying the original concept of the 1535 Novgorodka's design.
The coining of silver hammered dengas decreased after the 16th century, as they are found less frequently in coin hoards, but they are known up until the reign of Peter the Great. In 1704, Russia was the first country in the world to introduce a decimal monetary system, where one ruble was equal to 100 kopecks or 200 dengas.
By that time, the devaluation of the coinage had proceeded to such an extent that dengas weighed only about 0.14 grams, and were of little practical use. The production of Russian wire money stopped at all state mints in January of 1718.
You might want to check out my Photo Gallery of Russian Medieval Hammered Coins - Wire Money for detailed descriptions of the wire coins' obverses and reverses, and to see the exact cyrillic letters inscribed in the coin legends.
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